Appendix A. Further reading
Chapter 1
Grace Hopper’s use of wires to visualize latency is a great starting point of building intuition around latency. You can find a link to the part of her presentation where she shows some wires that were cut to the exact length of information traveling for a nanosecond at http://dataphys.org/list/grace-hopper-nanoseconds/.
A lot of low latency work is driven by how humans perceive things to give them a good user experience in ecommerce, productivity tools, and others. If you want to know more about the science of human perception, you should check out the research articles “The Information Visualizer, an Information Workspace” by Stuart Card et al (1991) and “Is 100 Milliseconds Too Fast?” by James Dabrowski (2001).
Google's and Amazon's findins on the impact of latency on engagement and revenue are often widely discussed, but surprisingly enough, the only source for them is a blog post from 2006 discussing the results: https://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html. However, Akamai's report on the impact of latency on online retail from 2017, tells a similar story: https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-releases-spring-2017-state-of-online-retail-performance-report.